Human Information Processing Challenges

Computational Limits to Human Thinking in a Society With Too Much Information And Too Little Time Raj Reddy Carnegie Mellon University October 16, 2020 Talk Presented at 2020 Global AI Conference, Hangzhou, China 1

Too Much Information and Too Little Time Drowning In Too Much Information and Too Little Time Severely lacking tools to cope with the problem Not a new problem, but the scale of the data and data rate has changed dramatically As early as 1969, Simon discussed the problem of Wealth of Information and Scarcity of Attention in Computers, Communications and Public Interest, Martin Greenberger 1971 Spawned the Field of Attention Economics White House Analogy Need-to-Know Principle Re-structure information: Organize, Summarize and Hyperlink Overview, Zoom, Filter and Details on Demand Simon on Reading Newspapers: It is a complete waste of time Social Networks like Facebook viewed primarily as entertainment

Principles of Information Overload Bounded Rationality and Satisficing When Faced with Information Overload, People Settle for Good Enough Solutions in Preference to Optimal Solutions When human thinking capabilities are overloaded, People use strategies and tactics of optimal-least-computation Optimal-least-computation is the study of approximate algorithms to find the best possible solution given limited memory capacity, limited time, or limited bandwidth Wealth of Information and Scarcity of Attention When faced with too much information and too little time, Embrace the Need-to-Know-Principle, by creating Summarization Tools Information Structuring Tools Use Techniques of Journalism and Cinematography Overview, Zoom, Filter and Details on Demand (Hyperlink the Details) Autocomplete Actions Non Intrusive Notifications

Enabling Human Strengths WIMPy to SILKy Interfaces Speech, Image, Language and Knowledge Forgiving Interfaces: Tolerate error and ambiguity You Bet --- Did That Mean Yes? Learning from Experience: Incremental non- intrusive knowledge acquisition Darn --- Would you Care to Define It? Intelligent Help, Advice and Tutoring Enthusiasm Detected --- Care to View Large Screen? Intelligent Agents: Task Execution Get me Sam Gallagher, Try Every Number

Overcoming Human Limitations To Err is Human Lead to Catastrophic loss of data ( I didn t mean to do that ) and Unanticipated side-effects What happened? Caused by Sensory, Cognitive and Motor overload Like being in a traffic jam Current solutions: Partial Undo and ^C Future Options: Unlimited Undo and Anytime Abort To Forget is Human A non-expert occasional user can t be expected to remember the details Forgetting is caused by the loss of indexing structure Current solutions: Recognition vs. recall: Menus and On- line manuals Future Options: Intelligent Help How do I and What if Multi-media documentation (Why not YouTube Model?)

Overcoming Human Limitations To Be Impatient is Human Waiting time to get the answer in interactive problem solving Long Start-up and Shutdown Times Network operations: Unpredictable retrieval and browsing times Current solutions: Hour glasses, Wheels and Progress Bars No idea how long it will take Future Options: Updates in the background, Learn from experience, Look ahead retrieval and computation To Favor Least Effort is Human Most people use a minimal subset of functionality in Word, PowerPoint, etc. Most people avoid tasks requiring too much cognitive effort e.g. PGP (too much work) and FTP (too complex) Causes: Principle of Least Effort Future Options: Autocomplete and Cognition Amplifiers

Cognition Amplifiers and Guardian Angels Cognition Amplifiers and Guardian Angels are two families of intelligent Agents that help with scarcity of attention problem A Cognition Amplifier is a Personal Enduring Autonomic Intelligent Agent that anticipates what you want to do and helps you to do it with less effort Buying and selling: Transact with multiple providers Email: Filter spam, understand and respond to actionable email News: Based on topic preferences, novelty, collaborative filtering Banking: Monitor bank account, Credit Cards, Pay Bills Travel: Flights, hotel, schedule disruptions, cancellations A Guardian Angel is a Personal Enduring Autonomic Intelligent Agent that Discovers And Warns You About Unanticipated Events That Could Impact Your Safety, Security, and Happiness Just-in-Time Warnings: Hurricanes, Tornados, Tsunami, Earthquakes, Flooding, Extreme Weather Accident Alerts and Rerouting; Transport Strikes Scarcity of Essential Resources: Food, Energy, Water etc. 7

The Digital Bill of Rights Every person on the planet with a smart phone (literate and non- literate alike) will be able to access and benefit from Intelligent Agents called Cognition Amplifiers. Non-intrusive Cognition Amplifiers learn with experience and minimize the human effort in performing the daily tasks by Getting the right information e.g. search engines To the right people e.g. categorizing, routing At the right time e.g. just-in-time (task modeling, planning) In the right language e.g. machine translation In the right medium e.g. using speech for language divide and literacy divide With the right level of detail (granularity) e.g. summarization 8

Conclusion In Designing Systems, Pay Attention to Human Strengths, Limitations, Needs, and Egos NEVER Intrusive Ads on the right or bottom, no animation Abolish Dialog Boxes - Replace with Notifications! Replace Live Tiles with WIWTBDIWC Glasses and Watches To Invisible Wearables Scarcity of Attention Tools for Minimization of Human Effort Use Cogs Autocomplete Tasks, not Just Text Use Gats to Help with Unpredictable Events Avoid Redesigns that Require Re-Learning Ribbons in Word Win 7 to Win 8 $10 Rule: Are You Willing to Pay Every Customer $10 Every Time You Radically Change Look And Feel Of Your Software Product? One Size Fits All Software Personalized Modular Software Personalize and Mass-customize everything